And then, in a flash, the smile was gone, and the light in her eyes dimmed, and I wanted to ask her what had happened, what she’d thought of to cause that change, but I didn’t know how.
“This was incredible, Danyal. Thank you.”
“Another dance before you go?” I asked.
“No,” she said with a chuckle. “You’re a terrible ‘dancer.’”
“Actually, I’m an awesome dancer. I was just getting warmed up before.”
She walked up to me. “I’m serious. This was…” She raised her shoulders in a half shrug. “It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. I’ll never forget it.”
“I’m happy to kick Zar out of his place any time you want to come over for dinner.”
“We… can’t do this again. I can’t.”
But she’d just said that she had a good time, that everything that I’d done was great. So what was she talking about?
She must’ve seen the confusion on my face. She put a hand on my chest, her long, thin fingers drumming a beat on my heart. “I’m sorry. You have to know that when I’m around you I feel like, maybe, in my personal life I’m allowed to be happy—”
“That’s good—”
“But this isn’t real, Danyal.” Bisma pulled her hand away and shook her head. “Tonight was amazing, but your mother is going to find a nice girl for you soon, and then all I’ll have left is… You’re just… you’re so easy to hope for, and when I start to hope, it feels like glass in my veins. And I know that glass is going to break and cut everything inside me to pieces. Do you understand?”
“What if it doesn’t have to break?” I asked. “What if I don’t care about what happened before?”
“Your parents will care. Won’t they?”
They would. Of course they would.
“Don’t make me promises you can’t keep. I like you so much. You’re one of the few people in my life I… I don’t want to end up hating you too. Please.”
I sighed and stepped back to give her room to go past me, but she stepped up to me again and stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek before walking out into the dark.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You seemed rather out of sorts again today, Mr. Jilani,” Tippett drawled, having kept me back after class again. “Over the last two years, I have gotten so used to your airheaded joyous apathy, it rather throws things off to not have it present. Your troubles, whatever they may be, are personally inconvenient to me, you see.”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“Trouble with your paper?”
“No. It’s a girl.”
“Young man,” he said with a chuckle, “this girl, whoever she is, certainly does steal away more of your smiles than seems ideal.”
“What?” I asked, confused for a second. Then I remembered that we’d had a similar conversation before, when Tippett had demanded to know my thesis. I’d been worried about Kaval being upset I wasn’t taking her advice about Renaissance Man then. “No, it’s another girl.”
“Really?” Tippett asked. “Aren’t you just a regular stamp collector.”
“That isn’t… that’s not what it’s like, okay? It’s complicated.”
“More complicated than the Battle of Waterloo? Than Carrhae? Than the Siege of Malta?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
I suddenly wondered if I should tell him about Bisma. I mean, he was hecka old. You don’t grow old without growing wise, right?
So without mentioning any names, I told Mr. Tippett about Bisma’s tape, what her father had done, and what had happened up till now.
“She’s a special girl. I really like her. But my family will never allow it. It’s an honor thing for them, same as it is for her father.”
“Ah. I see. That old gem-encrusted bowl of applesauce, hmm?”
“What?”
“It’s an expression,” my teacher said placidly.
“If you say so.”
“There is a curious phenomenon in this world, Mr. Jilani. For some reason, when it comes to the sexual habits of women, all of a sudden, men become very concerned with their honor. I don’t mean to sound rude or politically incorrect, of course, but I would suggest that the Muslim community should have more significant worries than a personal decision a young girl made.”
“I don’t disagree with you, but it doesn’t solve the problem. My parents still—”
“Well, in that quarter, I fear, no one can help you. You will, as the kids say nowadays, simply have to grow a pair of testes.”
“No one says that.”
“They most certainly do. In all your reading about Churchill, did you happen to see the definition of manhood that is misattributed to him?”
I shook my head.
“A man does what he must, Churchill is said to have remarked, in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, “but that just says to do what you must. It doesn’t tell me what I should do in this situation.”
“A fair point. Perhaps knowing what you have to do is the part that makes you a man in the first place.”
Tippett had said that a man ought to know what to do in tough situations. Well, I knew a smart guy who always seemed to know what to do. Sohrab.
Under normal circumstances, faced with a problem like this one, I would’ve already asked him for advice. Lately, however, he’d had so many worries on his mind that I hadn’t wanted to burden him further. I’d also been intent on protecting Bisma’s secret. I hadn’t even told Zar about it.
But surely Sohrab could be trusted. I needed help, and he was the one person with whom I’d always found it.
So, even though it was just before midnight, I texted him to see if I could come over, saying that it was super important.
Text me when you get here. Don’t ring the bell. Everyone is sleeping.
That was perfect, I thought, as I crept outside to my van. I really didn’t want to run into Kaval.
I hadn’t responded to her texts telling me she was meeting her cardiologist again, and we hadn’t spoken since. I felt guilty about that. I should’ve said something. I just had no idea what, though, and I didn’t want to hurt her.
Anyway, so now I’d been avoiding Kaval, or maybe she’d been avoiding me… or maybe we just didn’t have that much to say to each other. As I drove, I wondered if I should try to talk to her, at least. To explain why I’d gone quiet, but it seemed like a very tall mountain to climb. Maybe it was fine to just leave things the way they were between us. Maybe whatever roles we were meant to play in each other’s lives had come to an end.
I nursed the cup of coffee the shiny machine in the Sabsvari kitchen had spit out, watching Sohrab’s face carefully as I pressed him for a hundred promises that he wouldn’t ever tell a single soul what I was about to tell him.
Yes, my parents, and the Bay Area Muslim community, would probably find out about Bisma eventually. It wasn’t the kind of thing that stayed secret for long, and she’d apparently been telling her arranged marriage prospects about the video. Still, it wasn’t my story to tell anyone—well, except for Sohrab, obviously, because I needed his help.
My friend smiled at me in that wise man of the mountain way that he had and responded to my demand for secrecy with “If one promise from a man is worthless, then a hundred promises from him are worthless too.”
There it was. Exactly the kind of brilliant insight I’d come to him for. Hopefully he hadn’t used up all of his brain cells on that line, though, because he still had to solve my problem.
So, without mentioning her name, I told him about Bisma, about what had happened to her, and about how we’d been hanging out for months and that somehow, without realizing it, I’d found myself totally ensorcelled.
“Where is the sex tape?”
“Well… I mean, it’s not a tape,” I said. “It’s like… a sex USB. Or a sex cloud.”
“So there could be copies?”
“Yeah.”
“That is suboptimal.”
I shook my head. No one I know talks like that except Sohrab.
“It would be one thing for your family to deal with rumors. If it becomes something people can actually see…”
He trailed off and cocked his head, as if he’d heard something.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. It was probably just the house settling. Anyway, Danyal, I know it doesn’t feel like it, but there are plenty of girls in the world. Your parents will find you someone who doesn’t have these issues in her past. In fact, I think the odds are rather high you’ll never have to deal with anything like this ever again. All you have to do is walk away.”
“Sohrab, I really like this girl.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“I…” I waved my arms in the air, as if they could express what I was saying better than words. “I don’t know what it means when people say that. To be in love with someone, I mean. Isn’t there supposed to be an epic storm? And in its rain, I should be dangling from a web and sharing a magical upside-down kiss with her and—”
“Like from the Spider-Man movie?”
I nodded. “Right. Everyone always says that when you’re in love you just know it. I haven’t gotten any sign, Sohrab. There’s no shooting star that streaks from the heavens whenever I’m around her—”
“Like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai?”
“Yeah. If love isn’t like that, then what is it like? How can I be sure? Where’s my sign?”
Sohrab didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “Based on what you’ve told me, you should forget about this girl.”
“What?”
“Never see her again. Just make a clean break. It’ll be easier for you. It’ll be better for your family. You should walk away from her, Danyal.”
Never seeing Bisma Akram again… I couldn’t even imagine it. It was an impossible thing. I’d come here, I realized, and I’d asked the wrong question. I didn’t want to know whether I should be with Bisma. I wanted to know how to do it.
And now Sohrab was saying that I should just end everything with her?
Never see her smile again.
Never feel the almost accidental, almost innocent touch of her fingers against mine.
Never hear her laugh again. Never hear her talk again.
Live a life in which she was not present.
The thought of it made my chest hurt.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I won’t.”
My friend nodded, as if that was what he’d expected me to say. He pointed a finger at me. “That’s your sign.”
It took me a second, then I got it. “Whoa. I see what you did there.”
“I’m very clever. Now, is this a good time for us to talk about how your methods in pursuing this girl need to be halal and honorable, otherwise your soul will be in mortal peril?”
Oh. Right. There was another reason I hadn’t asked Sohrab about Bisma earlier. He was a pain.
“As much fun as that sounds, it’s kind of late. Let’s do that some other time.”
“All right,” Sohrab said. “It can be something to look forward to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
How do you tell a girl you’re in love with her?
More importantly, how do you tell a girl who has asked you not to make her any promises that you’re in love with her?
You don’t.
You just sit there, staring at her from across a library table while you’re supposed to be working on a super important essay. At least, that was the strategy I’d decided upon. It wasn’t great, but like Churchill said about democracy, it was the best I could come up with just then.
At least she was there. I’d been afraid that, after the way our dinner had ended, she wouldn’t come to the library anymore. What would I do then? Wander around Berkeley searching for the microbiology lab? Microbiologists have labs, right? Yeah. That sounds right.
I couldn’t go to her house. Not after the way I’d talked to her father. Plus, you know, that’d be pretty stalkery. If she hadn’t come today, it would’ve meant that she didn’t want to see me. I would’ve had to learn to respect that.
But she was here, so that meant—
“What’s wrong?” Bisma asked, looking up from the textbook she was reading.
I love you and I don’t know how to tell you because you don’t want to hear it.
It was really unfair. Not of Bisma, of course, but of Allah. I mean, I’d spent so much time thinking about what kind of girl I’d like. I’d had to describe this fantasy woman to my parents, which should be the first thing to come up online when someone googles the word awkward. I’d seen the pictures of so many prospects, and I’d even met a bunch of them, and I’d gone through all of that to ultimately end up in a library with a girl who loved superheroes and books and wore glasses but never dresses or heels and wanted to study biology—except not in a fun, hands-on kind of way. She wasn’t the kind of girl I’d imagined I wanted.
“Danyal?”
I’d been so wrong about what was important, though. All of that, except maybe for the part about the books, was surface-level stuff. I should have told my parents that I wanted someone who was quick to smile, who was patient when she had no reason to be, who made me feel good and took an interest in what I liked, and who cared about other people the way other people care about themselves.
I’d been looking for a beautiful face.
I should’ve been looking for a beautiful face pond.
“Hello? Danyal?”
I shook my head. “What?”
“What’re you thinking?”
“Just that I love you.…”
Crap. Crap. Holy pot stickers. Damn it. Why am I such an idiot?
Breathe. Breathe. Breathebreathebreathe.
Fix it. But how?
Words. I needed words. U words.
Did I know any U words?
Umm.
Not a word. That’s not a word.
Dude, this is taking too long, just pick something. Anything. The first U word you can think of. Say it. Say it now.
“Eulogies.”
Bisma stared at me. “What?”
What the fuck is a eulogies? Why is that a word I know? Didn’t matter. I was committed now.
“That’s right. I love eulogies. Love it. Can’t get enough of that eulogies. Eulogies is so great. So… uh… delicious, you know?”
Bisma pressed her lips together so hard they went white. She covered her mouth with her hand, and her small frame trembled with a mighty effort to keep her laughter in.
She failed.
One minute she was just sitting there, quietly doing her reading, and the next her laughter was slaughtering the carefully preserved silence around us. When people tried to shush her, it only made her laugh harder for some reason.
We got kicked out of the library is what I’m saying.
Sitting on the hood of the van, when Bisma was able to talk again, she spoke to me as I typed into my phone. “If you’re looking up eulogies right now, I’m going to die. I’m just letting you know. I’ll be dead.”
I stared at the screen. So. Not a U word, then.
I put my phone away. “That’s not at all what I’m doing.”
Bisma grinned and hopped down onto the concrete of the parking lot. She walked up to me, touched the side of my face, and said, “Well, for what it’s worth, I think eulogies is pretty great too.”
The next few weeks with Bisma weren’t all fun and games. In fact, there was almost no fun at all. Renaissance Man was getting close, and Bisma was crazy intense about getting the essay to be as good as it could possibly be. I could tell she was tempted to rewrite entire sections for me, but she never did. She just gave notes. Lots and lots and lots of very, very long notes.
I was more of a one-draft person. If that. I’d never understood why people thought writing essays was hard. Writing essays
was easy, as long as you were willing to pull an all-nighter and settle for a bad-to-okay grade. Revising was not my thing.
Honestly, if it had been anyone but Bisma trying to help me, I would’ve started to hate them a little, or at least gotten into a dozen fights with them. I listened to her, though, because she listened to me, and because I liked the sound of her voice. That was why we spoke over the phone a lot. I think she’d figured out I didn’t like long texts. Too much like reading.
Weeks of back and forth, writing and rewriting and just plain whining, and then, one morning, Bisma called me. “I read the draft you sent me last night,” she said. “It’s good.”
“But?”
“No. Danyal. I’m telling you. It is good.”
“We’re done?”
“Not yet.”
We couldn’t work on the presentation at the library because Bisma thought I had to rehearse it out loud—it was a performance, she said—so we went to Lake Elizabeth, a pretty big park in Fremont. It was kind of a great place for me to practice, actually, because while I was good at the talking bit—Bisma said I was compelling—I had a tendency to pace.
It’s apparently not good to wander around aimlessly when you’re giving a speech. You’re supposed to move to underscore points or whatever, not just because you’re restless.
Who sits around coming up with this crap is what I want to know.
Speaking of crap, Lake Elizabeth was basically a bathroom for geese. Their shit was everywhere, so my habit of walking while talking magically transformed into a desire to not move. I didn’t want to step in anything.
“The spirit of Churchill,” I told Bisma, even though she’d already heard this a bunch of times, “is the spirit of the tribe. Intense patriotism. Intense nationalism. Intense beliefs about racial and religious superiority—”
“Don’t look at your notes so much,” she said.
“I can’t remember the exact words without—”
More Than Just a Pretty Face Page 21
